Travelogue Entry 0: The Call to Adventure sets my course through tides of thought

When we find ourselves in opposition to society or the world, we are called to adapt ourselves or to adapt the world we find to fit ourselves. In the face of prejudiced refusal to accept our self advocated experience, I believe that trans and intersex people must resist the urge to please the world by bearing false witness against ourselves . It is with this goal of self-fidelity that I, as an intersex and genderqueer person, find myself drawing a connection and commonality between my gender and my sex. Not to say that one caused the other, but that I experience both as two manifestations of my epicene capacity. Which is to say: the ability to exist with the physical/intellectual/spiritual characteristics of both or without either characteristics of the two binary sexes or genders. Because I do not see this aspect of myself as alienating me from humanity, I wish to better understand how my epicene capacity is reflective of the capacity of humanity in general to exist beyond the binary.

And humanity proves that capacity time and time again. Despite modern critiques to the contrary, Non-binary and Intersex people crop up throughout global history not as an finite cultural movement, but as a statistical inevitability. Nor do these individuals make up a monolithic sub-group, but each instead presents their inner truths individually in accordance with their character and the receptibility of their circumstance. Nor is global history pervaded by the cultural norm that rejects such people. Societies in which humans who are neither men nor women, male nor female, are recognized, empowered, and even celebrated also pervade the timeline, many of which survive today. It seems unquestionable to me that the existence and the acceptance of people like me is as authentic to humanity as religion and art. The goal that drove the explorations to which this travelogue is devoted is to find the androgenous nature within all of humanity from which each intersex and non-bninary person derives that aspect of themselves, and to put this human nature into words in hopes that that our humanity would be unquestionable and apparent to those who now question and deny it. But this mission would not survive the voyage on which it led me.

Travelogue Entry the First: My journey has led me to the shores of Beach city, the residents are both human and crystalline

When discussing what is human and what is normal, I find wisdom in the social science concept of an Overton Window. An Overton Window is the region of possibility by which communities arrange ideas into the center of acceptability and the borderlands of the radical and the regressive. The language of space and territory is important to understanding Overton Windows, as societies form these systems as an overlay upon their physical landscapes, placing capitals at their center and pushing marginalized groups to the borders and beyond. Movement within and the movement of Overton Windows is also essential to understanding them, as communities internalize those ideas that were once unthinkable into the policies of their institutions as that society develops, while individuals and subcultures can move within a Window, becoming more accepted or demonized. In this way, Overton Windows have a fractal quality, as each community carries its own norms, and together form larger communities with aggregate norms. So too is the concept of borders and boundaries inherent to the Overton Window, as those found outside the bounds of the acceptable are forgotten or maligned by the powers within. 

When I was born, my biology was deemed too ambiguous in sex to leave alone, which is to say that my body was diagnosed unacceptably deviant. The boundaries of the Overton Window of which I found myself on the wrong side were made clear bureaucratically: my birth certificate was signed days after my birth, for my family and doctors took that time to decide which of the two approved letters would go in field denoting my sex. Only once this arbitrary decision was set in ink could my legal existence be processed. I have come to understand this judgment, and the medical procedures which sought to manifest this judgment upon my body, as a forcible movement of my position from without an Overton window to a place deemed safely within its borders, as a man. In response, I have sought to retrace this transnormative path, and reclaim the space I once inhabited as being an authentic position for a human to exist. As previously written, the concept of “Pools of Possibility” from the show Steven Universe has offered me profound affirmation to this interpretation of my past and the journey I have set out upon. The idea that some pools of possibility are remote or disconnected from normal modes of behavior suggested to my mind that epicene humanity might be one of these. I decided that I was looking for a region within human self-conception in which I could reclaim my legitimacy, and so I kept sailing in search of my native shore.

Travelogue Entry the Second: Navigating the Archipelago of Strange Alchemies – pursued by TERFs

But human gender and sex is not actually a structure of divided territories, but far more like a scatterplot graph in which all of humanity is cast and normative individuals gravitate into two generalized distributions. If each person is a single point, masculinity and femininity are groupings of relative similarity, of which no two members need have anything else in common. Two people who gather close to the grouping deemed “Women” may have two very different, yet equally profound, relationships with that concept and femininity. This frame asks if intersex and non-binary people are but the far flung points in this scatterplot graph, who do not necessarily find themselves divided from binary people, but do not share with them an identity of, or perhaps a body identified with, these binary alignments. 

What I particularly enjoy about this frame of a scatterplot graph is how similar the pattern of epicene individuals is in form to the occult concept of Philosophical Mercury, the medium that mediates the movement between the Yang of Salt and the Yin of Sulphur. Alchemy uses this schema to bridge the stark dualism of gendered philosophies with the diverse variety found in the world of life and elements: the triad of Salt, Mercury, and Sulphur forming the third step in the Pythagorean tetractys between the second level push and pull of dualism and the fourth level populated with the classic Greek elements. This arcane schema is built around the dichotomy of coagulation and dissolution, but seeks to transcend that binary as well. I have found much affirmation for queerness in Esoteric Alchemy, with its Divine Marriage and Mystic Rebis, which the psychologist Carl Jung opined to be hermaphoditic symbols. Some Alchemists believe that Philosophical Mercury is both the Salt of the Earth and the Ephemeral Sulphur, being composed of the composite instances exchanged from either or those instances orbiting off to the side, all aspects of this triad flowing into and feeding one another.

 Similarly, the epicene patterns in the scatterplot of human sex and gender are often interpreted by Gender Critical writers as the callamitous erosion of the sacred and separate catagoeies of male and female. What I find critical is that we queer individuals do not give in to fears that our existence represents entropic departures from anything – anything but outdated norms, that is. Queerness is not a matter of reneging from cis-heteronormativity, but a recognition of the human realities that lie beyond it. By this I mean that to deny the personal truth of queer people leads critics to malign us as representing a threatening cultural movement, a movement away from normalcy, the changed habits of a person who would otherwise be dyatic, cisgender, or heterosexual. This is a narrative that cannot accept the self-advocacy of individuals over the fear of difference, but within the heart of this narrative lies the language from which the truth of queerness can be affirmed. Queerness as a word, after all, has less meaning in social contexts that lack the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman and must be one who desires the other.

Travelogue Entry the Third: I’ve learned to Hold Fast to people, not the words used as our tools 

While some may find this aspect daunting, the mercurial nature of words is quite comforting to me. That is the creative beauty of language: words cannot appear to declare without first describing, nor can they define without acknowledging ambiguity. The absolutist who first insisted that “All of humanity is either only a man or woman”, knowingly or unknowingly set this language on a collision course with those humans who live outside the boundaries drawn therein, for to say a thing is to define it as well by what you say it is not. By drawing close the borders of humanity to form two mutually exclusive regions of men and women is to allude to the other examples of humanity against which those borders are drawn. Just as to draw a circle around a space, and to attest its form and limitations, is to also mark out its distinctions against the context from which it is drawn. The risk you take in drawing magic circles is that someone else might later cross them.

Words are not concrete things, Plato, they are tools created to assist in our survival, which change over time as their usage needs to be adapted. The presence of ancient words, literature, and laws referring to non-binary and intersex people makes clear our historical existence, but so too does any era’s attempt to deny our existence. And don’t we as transgender people of this era know it, to have been denied our own experience of ourselves in deference to the static stability of words? And despite this deference, the words always change. The usage of the word always changes, our understanding of what the word refers to and how we can engage with that reality through language always changes. A living language evolves, because life moves on. Useful dictionaries are descriptive of language, not prescriptive, for no single institution could ever hold language static, dead, and unchanging. The exact words I am searching for will not be the reality I want. The words will encase it, like a frame unto a picture, and hint at it, as a code alludes to its message. I cannot quantify the queer experience in exacting descriptors, instead I would qualify it as the poet qualifies the beauty if their muse within aesthtics of their wording. My journey to study the epicene potential in humanity could never produce an exact summary that applied equally to all individual instances of sex and gender diversity. To think otherwise would be to misapprehend the goal of my voyage before I had even launched.

Travelogue Entry the Fourth: The Pilgrimage was always about crossing those Gulfs found within

Therefore, I know that I am not looking for an external truth or natural law at all, there is no platonic androgyne that hands out the queerness before each of us are all born. Within the modern era, queerness has been nurtured into an composite culture by which people, who were always present in humanity, assert our lives as examples of legitimate human experience. Queer culture is the interpersonal culture of queer individuals. While each of our scatterplot points might have been marked singly, through communication and community we have contributed to an amalgamation by which we can feel far less alone and historically anomalous. Transphobes may clutcher pearls to see cartoon characters in dresses (thanks Bugs) and homophobes may try to block their children’s gaze at depictions of same sex couples (thank you Adora), but it does not make an iota of difference to our continued existence because queerness does not come from queer culture. It is always the reverse; individuals experiencing queerness in their own lives give rise to queer culture by voicing what they have seen and know to be true. Like so many other queer people, I have finally come to ask myself: If I cannot deny the authenticity of this queerness found without myself, why am I not giving that same benefit to the queerness discovered within myself?

I may not have found what I am looking for in any external culture, but I better understand my query now. Having dispensed with these preconceptions, I am left with the self-awareness that my goal is derived from a desire for legitimacy. Not for people like me, a personal legitimacy for myself alone. Regrettably, I have grown up believing that humanity is a title to which I must look to others to recognize in me or to award to me, because I look within and see nothing natural to my persona. But is that truly because I lack the legitimacy that I see in others, or does no one contain so certain a clue? Through my inward vigilance, have I not denied myself the opportunity to simply  assume my humanity exists? I see now that this is not what a person’s humanity is, no naturally occurring inward proof that provides an objective assertion that the querent is a human. I have come to learn that our humanity, my humanity, is a subjective experience of internal qualia and of the human condition in this temporal life. Only I can say that I am human, for only I have direct experience of my humanity, which is a messy interaction of multiple parts. Everyone else must gain knowledge of my humanity from me, secondhand.

Travelogue Entry the Fifth: The pilgrim, being both seeker and treasure sought, is self satisfied

So too is my experience of my androgyny, personal, subjective, and mine alone. I cannot seek outside myself the confirmation that the queerness within me is legitimate and human. Nor can I prove this by analyzing my every thought and sensation. I still believe that there is some way of understanding why so many humans defy the narrative that we are all either men or women, male or female. I believe it to be some truth of the human experience I have yet to put into words or hear put into words. But I still believe that I can engage with this truth of humanity, despite my ignorance. This Truth can be played with and thought about more easily without also bearing the weight of those granite-set definitions of binary thinking. And I still have hope that, if this truth were put into the poet’s wording, others would pause their denials of our existence upon hearing it. The logic of correcting our abnormalities with surgery and silence would falter, the compassion of one human recognizing a human experience in another would bloom. And queer people would no longer need to fight to exist as who we are already in this society, but could rest, breath, and flourish.

 But now I know that, like all spells, these hoped for words must first serve to satisfy the speaker’s soul. No words of wisdom can move a heart that comes not from those same revelations within the poet. It is an ill wind that blows no minds, and the sails of my wonder will not be filled with such insubstantial zephyrs. I know not yet what phrase will disturb the comfortable, whose cruelty needs jostling, but I have faith that I will know its truth when those words comfort that which in me is disturbed by the cruelties of complacency. Until I chance upon that phrase, that riddle or truth or mantra, I will keep piloting the pilgrimage of my soul through the thoughtful tides and peruse the occult currents of human culture.

Be It So!